Why Support Crazy?

So I've been thinking and writing about why not to vote Republican, and at the top of my list today is that voting Republican seems to be voting for crazy. Here are some examples:

• Top of the list--the birther nonsense. Really. The Iowa GOP platform "calls for presidential candidates to 'show proof of being a ‘natural born citizen’ of the United States'" because there are many really unbelievably idiotic people who think Barack Obama is not a 'natural born' citizen. [h/t, "Political Animal.] There is ol' Sheriff Joe Arpaio sending his posse to Hawaii to take a gander at the President's official birth certificate. (But since one of the "posse" members is writing a birther conspiracy book with birther conspiracist Jerome Corsi, you can bet he won't believe what he sees. Otherwise, he won't be able to sell that book, huh?) And then there's Arizona's secretary of state blustering about keeping President Obama off Arizona's ballot in November unless Hawaiian officials send him some more proof of Obama's citizenship. Um....Hawaiian officials have already verified Barack Obama's birth certificate, idiot. Of course, Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett is also a Republican and Mitt Romney's Arizona co-chair, so he has a vested interest in the birther histrionics.
• Then there's the rejection of science, which I had meant to address in a stand-along post, but I just don't have the energy to write about how stupid I think Republicans are for their know-nothingness. Recent example? The House Republican vote to eliminate the American Community Survey, a survey that "has been around in some form since 1850, either as a longer version of or a richer supplement to the basic decennial census" and that serves as the "country’s primary check for determining how well the government is doing — and in fact what the government will be doing." According to The New York Times, "[i]t is the largest (and only) data set of its kind and is used across the federal government in formulas that determine how much funding states and communities get for things like education and public health." The article describes other important uses of this survey, too. And here are the stupid comments by one Republican house member, Daniel Webster, "a first-term Republican congressman from Florida who sponsored the relevant legislation":

  “This is a program that intrudes on people’s lives, just like the Environmental Protection Agency or the bank regulators..... “We’re spending $70 per person to fill this out. That’s just not cost effective,” he continued, “especially since in the end this is not a scientific survey. It’s a random survey.”

  Let's parse crazy: programs that intrude on peoples' lives--Really. Does anyone remember acid rain? Love Canal? lead poisoning? mercury poisoning? If you don't, look up those phrases in Wikipedia. Yes, the EPA affects people's lives, idiot man. Oh, and bank regulators? Have we so easily forgotten the last financial crisis which exploded during the Bush administration and the aftereffects with which we are still coping? 
  not a scientific survey, but a random survey--Really. A random survey IS a scientific survey. Who is voting for people like this?
  
  
  And don't get me started on the whole climate change denial of the Republican party. That craziness alone deserves a separate blog post. I'm just not sure I've got the patience to go there.
  
  
  These are not people I want leading my country in tough times. But evidently a lot of people think crazy is just hunky-dory.
  
  

  links

  "President Obama's Long Form Birth Certificate", at www.whitehouse.gov

  
  

  "Zombie Birtherism: The Conspiracy that doesn't Know It's Dead," Eric Lach, TPMMuckraker

  
  

  "Hawaii verifies Obama's Birth For Arizona Secretary of State"

  
  

  Left Action's Mitt Romney is a Unicorn petition
  
  "Time to Wean the Birthers"

Reasons not to Vote Republican, Part 2b: Refusing to Disavow Conspiracy Theories

Reason #2b: Refusing to Disavow Paranoia and Conspiracy Theories

I'm going to follow through with my plan to write several posts on why not to vote Republican in 2012 (which translates to why I'm not going to vote Republican, because--haven't you read your neuropsychology?--whose mind am I going to change) although I already feel as if I've fallen down a rabbit hole. But these are the rational posts I'm going to cling to as the Crazy Season hits hurricane force before the election. 

I can't think of a single mainstream Democrat who publicly supported the crazy conspiracy on the far left that President George W. Bush and the American government destroyed the Twin Towers, but I don't have enough fingers to count the mainstream Republicans who have publicly supported the Birthers or who have remained silent in the presence of others who publicly support the Birthers. That anyone believes that Barack Obama's birth certificate is a forgery is a mystery to me, for that belief requires all kinds of mental contortions. Do people really believe that one political party would allow a member of the other political party to become president if that president-elect were not a natural born citizen? Geez.  I personally know people who believe the Birthers, who think that Barack Obama is president illegitimately. (Where were these people when the Supreme Court ordered that the vote recounting be stopped in Florida in 2000? Oh, and by the way, the loser in that election supported the right of George W. Bush to be accepted as president.)

But, hey, refusing to disavow the crazy birthers helps Republicans in the polls. Donald Trump received a bump in the polls when he stepped aboard the Birther Train. In February 2011:

Fifty-one percent of 400 Republican primary voters surveyed nationwide by Public Policy Polling said they ascribe to the controversial birther conspiracy theory — despite the fact that the state of Hawaii has posted Obama’s certificate of live birth.

 Only 28 percent said they think the president was born in the United States — a constitutional requirement to be president. Twenty-one percent said they were “not sure." (Politico, "Poll: 51 percent of GOP primary voters think Obama born abroad.")

In April of last year, the new Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus, was reported in an interview with U. S. News and World Report to repudiate the birthers and their crazy conspiracy, but later, Priebus tweeted that he never said that. As Sahil Kapur states in a blog post on the topic ("RNC chairman denies he ever repudiated 'birthers'"): "[t]hat Priebus felt the need to back away from what US News & World Report depicted as nothing more than a clear repudiation of the birthers is a testament to the influence that the fervent conspiracy theorists have in mainstream Republican circles."

Overlapping the birther crazies are the Obama-should-be-impeached-for-treason crazies and Obama-is-a-Muslim crazies. Mitt Romney is being compared to John McCain because of an incident that happened at a town hall meeting near Cleveland, Ohio, this week.  A woman who stood to ask Romney a question said that Obama "should be tried for treason," for which comment she received a round of applause from the audience. In a similar situation in the last presidential primary, when a woman at a town hall meeting said that she didn't trust Barack Obama because he was "an Arab," John McCain denied her claim civilly, saying that Obama was a "decent family man, citizen." But the current Republican presidential candidate let stand with no comment a claim that our president is "treasonous"--until much later, away from the crazies, when he was questioned by reporters.

Mainstream Republicans are acting in rational self-interest, of course, by not repudiating birtherism and other crazy shit conspiracy theories that have sprung up to try to deny our first black president's right to the office. Those of us who remember the Clinton years remember how well conspiracy theories rallied the far-right base then. But, really, if mainstream Republicans repudiated the conspiracy theories of the far right, would those voters vote the Democratic ticket? Of course not. But they might stay home and stew in their conspiracy juices and not vote at all. 

This is personal for me. Although I am no longer on the crazy list for forwarded political e-mails, I am just tired of hearing people I know spout this stuff. Thank you, Reince and all you other otherwise rational Republicans, for helping destroy whatever respect I once had for some of those I love. But even more importantly, now that you've gotten in bed with conspiracy theorists, you're going to have a difficult time kicking them out of the bedroom if you win the presidential election in 2012. What will you concede to then for their support?

Crazy "Birthers"

Update below

After publishing my previous post this morning, in which I ended on some comments about crazy "birthers," I received an e-mail from an anonymous person "arguing" (I use the term loosely here) that the vote on Sotomayor should be postponed because Barack Obama's presidency is illegitimate. The "argument"? That Obama couldn't be president because he holds "dual citizenship" with the U.S. and with Kenya. I won't publish the comment because the writer does not identify himself/herself and because it seems to have been some kind of robo-response. It might have been copied from some mass e-mail, for it bears the characteristics of those blightful communications (illogical sentences, confused content, inflated language). But I've summarized the gist of the comment here.

As Steve Benen notes, these people never quit, no matter how many times they have been confronted with the facts. The non-partisan Factcheck.org also is fed up with responding to these folks, as indicated in the post "The Last Word? We Wish."

We at FactCheck.org are grateful to the Obama birth certificate conspiracy theorists for hundreds of thousands of page views to our "Born in the U.S.A." article from last November, and to our other items debunking some of their more outrageously false claims. We’re less grateful for their thousands of sometimes abusive e-mails claiming that we’re perpetuating a dangerous falsehood, among the more printable comments. Dr. Chiyome Fukino, director of the Hawaii Department of Health, is also fed up. She has now released her second statement (the first was made last November) saying that state records show Obama was indeed born in the U.S.A. This one states unequivocally that he is "a natural-born American citizen," and will everyone please just leave it alone now? (We confess we are paraphrasing that second part.)

And in case my readership (which is small!) actually includes crazy birthers, here is the link to Factcheck.org's 2008 post on Barack Obama's citizenship: "Born in the USA: The Truth about Obama's Birth Certificate," posted August 21, 2008 and updated November 1, 2008. And in March, FactCheck.org fielded another silly claim by birthers: "More Citizenship Quibbles."As far as dual citizenship, Factcheck. org addressed that bit of silliness back in 2008, too: "Does Barack Obama Have Kenyan Citizenship,". As the factchecker on that issue noted, after a good discussion of that issue:

"the Kenyan Constitution prohibits dual citizenship for adults. Kenya recognizes dual citizenship for children, but Kenya's Constitution specifies that at age 21, Kenyan citizens who possesses citizenship in more than one country automatically lose their Kenyan citizenship unless they formally renounce any non-Kenyan citizenship and swear an oath of allegiance to Kenya.

Since Sen. Obama has neither renounced his U.S. citizenship nor sworn an oath of allegiance to Kenya, his Kenyan citizenship automatically expired on Aug. 4,1982.

But, then, as my husband has often reminded me, crazy people are not rational, and, thus, facts mean nothing to them.

Update: More on those birther statistics in the South can be found here: "Early Poll Data: Half Of All Virginia Voters Are Birthers," Eric Kleefield, posted on Talking Points Memo, 3 August 2009.

Regional Bias

Most people feel at least a little faithful to the region in which they were born and in which they grew up. We want to defend our "home," even when that defense might seem wrong-headed. If we are thoughtful people, we recognize the shortcomings of our birth home, and, when we do, wish for improvement. And, of course, we get defensive when people from other regions spout ill-founded judgments about the region with which we most closely identify. Southerners, particularly, seem to have to work hard to overcome negative images some people have of the region and its people. I was reminded of this bias on our trip to the northern California Pacific Coast to visit very dear friends who had moved from the South (Louisiana) to Crescent City, California.

We had been in the area for about a day when one of my friend's new local friends dropped by to meet us. This well-spoken, lovely woman in her sixties had grown up in Oregon. Within only a few minutes, she expressed her ambivalence about the South. "I think I would like to visit the South," she said, "but I'm a little afraid of the South. It's prone to violence, isn't it? Several years ago at a conference [she was a counselor until she retired], we discussed a study that concluded that Southerners tended more to violence because the South was settled by Scots-Irish."

Oh, yes--the study that proves Southerners are more violent than other Americans because the majority of them are descended from Scots who settled in northern Ireland where bloody war continued between the Protestant Scots and the Catholic Irish--these "Scots-Irish" later immigrated to the United States in great numbers, many of them moving to the Appalachians and further south. That study continues to be used by otherwise thoughtful folks to bolster their bias toward the South. My husband encountered the study when we lived in Minnesota; folks at a Minnesotan university brought it up in an interview with him. Behind the reference to that study is the suggestion that the Southerner in the room is therefore suspect: he can't be trusted because he might have heretofore unexpressed violent tendencies. It's used as an excuse to condescend to and to judge an individual based on his or her place of birth. And it encourages the undiscerning to judge a whole region of individuals, many of whom have very mixed genetic heritage.

Of course, some information coming out of the South makes even me wonder what's up with us. Take the "birther" movement. Although it's not just Southerners who question Barack Obama's birth--despite hard evidence, including a birth certificate (!) that proves the man was born in the U.S.--an astonishingly high percentage of Southerners question Obama's right to the presidency based on this "birther" conspiracy. As Steve Benen discusses in this post, a recent poll indicates that some 20% or so of Southerners think Barack Obama was not born in the United States and 30% are unsure. How can that be? Is that 20% of ALL Southerners or 20% of Southern REPUBLICANS? Can it be true that about 50% of Southerners either believe Barack Obama was not born in the U.S. or that perhaps he wasn't? Statistics like that make me want to enroll in a voice class to eliminate my Southern drawl.

The bottom line is, however, that we shouldn't judge individuals based on statistical studies. We should judge them by their own character.

Update: Steve Benen addresses more birther nonsense today: "They'll never stop," Washington Monthly, 3 August 2009.